RIGOR MORTIS is a zombie-focused zine that is part academic, part fanboy/fangirl. Started by the dynamic Davida Gypsy Breier, it’s one of the best resources for information on obscure zombie films, book and more. Nancy O. Greene recently had a chance to talk shop with Davida about the zine.

FLAMES RISING: You started RIGOR MORTIS while going through a very tough time. Can you talk a bit about that?

DAVIDAGYPSY BREIER: In 2007, my partner was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was only 31 and began a tough regiment of chemo and an antibody treatment. Our son was just a year old. One of my zine friends, Dread Sockett, understood personally and professionally what we were both going through and I found myself calling and emailing him semi-regularly. When you are living with cancer, often the last thing you want to talk about is cancer. So we talked about what we were reading and watching. I was drawn to zombie and end of the world literature – it was soothing in an odd way. My world was being threatened on a daily basis, so the world ending was somehow fitting. My friend was dealing with panic attacks, as was I as we entered the fifth month of treatment, and we’d have these rambling calls and emails.

So we threw out the idea of collaborating on a zine together, which was really an attempt to capture the conversations we were having about all things zombie. He and I had both been publishing since the mid-‘90s, but we had never collaborated with anyone before. It was obvious from the start he would do the art and I would handle editing and layout. The first issue was mostly review-based, but then we started getting heavier into article content and the art in the last issue especially was amazing.

FR: Why a zine?

DGB: I’ve been publishing zines since 1995. I work in book publishing professionally, but something about zines appealed to me when I was 23, and they still appeal to me today. They are accessible, better suited to subcultures, and I think we had a sense that we wanted to do something that touched on the long history of fanzines, but was still a zine. Eventually, we would also invite Grim Pickens, my partner, and Colin Cthulhu, a comic book store owner in Chicago, to contribute. Both of them have also been long-time zinesters.

FR: It seems to me that RM is part scholarly and part pop culture. Is this intentional, or just a natural outcome of the passion for the subject matter, or both?

DBG: I think it is a natural outcome of the passion, and is also indicative of the four contributors. We tend to talk a lot of shit, but know that we better back it up, so you see the blend of snarky commentary mixed in with academic-type research.

FR: You’ve talked about expanding RM beyond the zombie realm. What other subjects are you interested in exploring?

DGB: We’ve looked at doing more with apocalyptic themes. Dread Sockett is a huge fan of classic horror and wants to school fans who dismiss old films. We are also working on a zombie/apocalypse graphic novel.

FR: Where do you see RM going in the future? Is World Domination on the menu?

DGB: It started out as a fun distraction during a very rough time. It still needs to be fun for us and as long as it is we’ll keep producing issues. The main reason RM#5 didn’t come out is that we focused on the graphic novel. We are trying to produce work that will stand beyond the idea of zombies as a fad. That is also one of the reasons we have dug deeper (e.g. Nazi zombies and Voodoo zombies) and tried to look at the genre before and after Romero.

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